Some news about Calibre in Debian: I have been added to the list of maintainers, thanks Martin, and the recent release of Calibre 3.4 into Debian/unstable brought some fixes concerning the desktop integration. Now I am working on Calibre 3.5. Calibre 3.5 separates out one module, html5-parser, into a separate package which needs to be included into Debian first. I […]

I normally don’t play survival games or walking simulators, but The Long Dark by Hinterland Games, which I purchased back then when it was still in early access on Steam, took me into new realms. You are tossed out into the Canadian wilderness with hardly anything, and your only aim is to survive, find shelter, food, craft tools, hunt for […]

Is it possible to do software development, mathematical or not, as mathematician in academics? This is a question I was asking myself recently a lot, seeing my own development from logician at a state university getting rid of foreigners to software developer. And then, a friend pointed me to this very depressing document: The origins of SageMath by William Stein, […]

Yesterday I uploaded the first update of the TeX Live packages in Debian after TeX Live 2017 has entered Debian/unstable. The packages should by now have reached most mirrors. Nothing spectacular here besides a lot of updates and new packages. If I have to pick one update it would be the one of algorithm2e, a package that has seen lots […]

Some month ago I upgrade my (European) fenix3 to a (Japanese) fenix 5x, looking forward to the built-in maps as well as support for Japanese. I was about to write a great review, how content I have been with the fenix 3 and how much better the 5x is. Well, until I realized that Garmin’s engineers seem to be brain-damaged […]

A lovely little game, Refunct, just crossed my Steam installation. A simple platformer developed with much love. The game play consists of reviving a lost area by stepping on towers, finding buttons, and making more towers appear through this. The simple game play idea is enriched with wonderful lightening due to the movement of the sun. I really enjoyed the […]

I mean, it is easy to make fun of Trump, he is just too stupid and incapable and uneducated. But what the French president Emmanuel Macron did on Bastille Day, in presence of the usual Trumpies, was just above the usual level of making fun of Trump. The French made Trump watch a French band playing a medley of Daft […]

All those working in academics or research have surely heard about academia.edu. It started out as a service for academics, in their own words: Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. The company’s mission is to accelerate the world’s research. But as with most of these platforms, they need to get money, and since some months now […]

Thanks to the cooperation with upstream authors and the maintainer Martin Pitt, the Calibre package in Debian is now up-to-date at version 3.4.0, and has adopted a more standard packaging following upstream. In particular, all the desktop files and man pages have been replaced by what is shipped by Calibre. What remains to be done is work on RAR support. […]

It is my pleasure to announce the renewal/rework/restart of the TeX Live contrib repository service. The repository is collecting packages that cannot enter TeX Live directly (mostly due to license reasons), but are free to distribute. The basic idea is to provide a repository mimicking Debian’s nonfree branch. The packages on this site are not distributed inside TeX Live proper […]

I have updated my Calibre Debian repository to include packages of the current Calibre 3.1.1. As with the previous packages, I kept RAR support in to allow me to read comic books. I also have forwarded my changes to the maintainer of Calibre in Debian so maybe we will have soon official packages, too. The repository location hasn’t changed, see […]

Recently I have been programming quite a lot in R, and today stumbled over the problem to implement a kind of monitoring loop in R. Typically that would be a infinite loop with sleep calls, but I wanted to allow for waking up from the sleep via sending UNIX style signals, in particular SIGINT. After some searching I found Beyond […]

Yesterday I uploaded the first packages of TeX Live 2017 to Debian/unstable, meaning that the new release cycle has started. Debian/stretch was released over the weekend, and this opened up unstable for new developments. The upload comprised the following packages: asymptote, cm-super, context, context-modules, texlive-base, texlive-bin, texlive-extra, texlive-extra, texlive-lang, texworks, xindy. I mentioned already in a the following changes: several […]

I have updated my Calibre Debian repository to include packages of the upcoming version 3, currently version 2.99.10. As with the previous packages, I kept RAR support in to allow me to read comic books. The repository location hasn’t changed, see below. Please report your experiences to the Calibre beta support channel at MobileRead. deb http://www.preining.info/debian/ calibre main deb-src http://www.preining.info/debian/ […]

Sometimes I needed a short break from work, and usually I go a bit running. Normally I run between five and ten km, just around our flat. But yesterday I somehow thought it might be a good idea to run through the hills near by. I usually drive up there to a climbing spot or a cafe, so it will […]